LACK OF DAD IS NOT SO
BAD...

Los Angeles Times 8/14/97

by Lynn Smith

What divorcing couple hasn't heard horror
stories about what the split might do to their children? Especially if
Mom is left to raise the kids alone. A father's absence in the home, according
to almost every fathers' group, could well spell doom for little boys,
little girls and the future of the nation.

Not necessarily, according to a new study
from the universities of Southern California and Washington.

Stable, two-parent families still appear
to do the best job of raising kids. But when income and job status are
taken into account, children raised by single mothers are nearly as likely
to succeed in adulthood, and, interestingly enough, they are even more
likely to succeed than children raised in homes headed by a stepfather
or a single father.

"Kids from male-headed households,
single dads, do worse socioeconomically than kids from mother-headed homes
and also two-parent families," said USC sociologist Timothy Biblarz,
the study's lead author.

The study analyzed a survey of 22,761 men
ranging in age from 25 to 64. They had been asked to report the occupation
of the head of the household in which they grew up and to list their own
occupations. All occupations were ranked on a 100-point scale, with 100
requiring the most education and returning the most income.

Men from traditional families averaged
42 on the scale, while men in mother-headed households averaged 40, no
matter whether the mothers had been divorced, widowed or never married.
Children from other types of non-traditional homes ranked 35.

Previous studies presumed that children
did poorly in single-mother homes because the structure itself was "pathological."
Even researchers skeptical about the effects of family structure on children's
development have pushed for policies to bring a man into a divorced home
because of his paycheck.

"They assume if there's a divorce,
you've got to have policies to encourage remarriage to get a man back into
the household because of added income," Biblarz said. "Our findings
challenge that to some extent."

Most negative effects were due to the greater
likelihood that single mothers would be unemployed, Biblarz said. "When
you compare two-parent households where fathers were managerial/professional
with kids whose single mothers were managerial/professional, there's not
a lot of difference between the two socioeconomic outcomes as they get
into adulthood."

The researchers suspected a step-parent's
income may be offset by other issues, such as a greater emotional distance
and more conflict. "Bringing a man into the home doesn't mean kids
will get a high level of investment from that setpparent," Biblarz
said.

The analysis suggests that, "if you
want your kid to maintain the same status or class you're in, having Mom
around and plugged into the family is more important than Dad," said
Jeffrey Evans of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

[liznote: we really
don't need studies to tell us what children need. They need their primary
caregivers, usually their mothers -- in the most comfortable, unstressed,
and educationally stimulating environment possible. That's what yields
the best results in the intact biological homes, and that what has been
shown by this study. We already know that. We already know
who, in the overwhelming most of households, regardless of their make-up,
is actually raising the children, spending the most time with them in all
the little myriad mundane ways when smarts are acquired and values are
learned. We already know that it's far likelier that children brought up
in an environment where the parent or parents are better educated and hold
professional positions are going to themselves be those who achieve educational
and socioeconomic success in life. We already know that what parents themselves
have is what they are going to impart to their children, whether it is
education, native intellect, a value system or just plain joy and serenity
in life -- and that the misery created by divorce and exacerbated by our
current policies which strip this from mothers are going to make the problems
worse. Enough already with the political nonsense which is game-playing
with children's lives.]

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